Take a genuine interest in people or a business. Praise them whenever possible and don’t fake it with phony flattery. Figure out ways to help people in personal or business relationships.

Live by these rules, and your chances of personal and business achievement skyrocket.

Those simple concepts, the foundation of so many successful careers and lives, were popularized 75 years ago with the publication of Dale Carnegie’s path-breaking “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

It is a book that set the standard for hundreds of other self-help and business-management books that followed. Many of them would, consciously or not, pay tribute to Carnegie and his ideas of selflessness in business and in life.

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view,” writes Carnegie in his book, quoting automaker Henry Ford.

Get people to like you, Carnegie endlessly preached. This is a lesson accepted by numerous self-help writers.

“All things being equal, people do business with people they like,” says John Maxwell, the author of “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.” “All things not being equal, they still do. We like people who like us.”

By any definition, Carnegie’s book has been a success and influenced generations, here and abroad. It has sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages. And the sales never stop.

Indeed, some 300,000 copies were sold just in the United States in 2009, according to Brent Cole, who recently updated the book in “How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age.”

The book is still in print, some 56 years after Carnegie’s death, and its thesis has been restated in countless other business and self-help tomes.

For instance, Jim Collins in “Good to Great” argues that business leaders triumph by personal humility and professional will. Natural leaders, Collins writes, in a sentiment that Carnegie would have approved, “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.”

And Peter Drucker, the guru of business management in the last century, stated his Carnegie-like business philosophy in “The Practice of Management”: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does our customer consider valuable?”

Indeed, Carnegie sums up his philosophy of “help the other guy first, and you’ll ultimately be the winner” when he writes, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can by trying to get people interested in you.”

Friending the world

Dale Carnegie literally wrote the book on getting ahead in business, “How toWin Friends and Influence People.”